Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma / Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975)
Direction: Pier Paolo Pasolini. Screenplay: Pier Paolo Pasolini and Sergio Citti; inspired by the Marquis de Sade’s book. Cast: Paolo Bonacelli, Giorgio Cataldi, Umberto Paolo Quintavalle, Aldo Valletti, Caterina Boratto, Elsa De Giorgi, Hélène Surgère, Sergio Fascetti, Bruno Musso, Antonio [...]
World Cinema Clips: Luis Buñuel, exiled from Spain since 1938, returned to his country of birth to make Viridiana, a low-key — but pitch-black — comedy about traditional European (read: Christian) mores that went on to receive the 1961 Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or.
The film stars Silvia Pinal as a young, idealist nun-to-be whose efforts [...]
Screendaily reports that four documentaries scheduled for the 21st Singapore International Film Festival (SIFF), which kicked off on April 4, have been banned by local censors.
According to the report, two of the documentaries — Arab-American director Bassam Haddad’s Arabs and Terrorism, about opposing views on political terror, and Mano Khalil’s David the Tolhildan, which [...]
While London’s Lesbian & Gay Film Festival is going on in full force, here’s a brief q&a (via e-mail) with Lisa Daniel, the director of another gay film festival elsewhere in the world, the Melbourne Queer Film Festival.
First held in 1991, the Melbourne Queer Film Festival is reportedly one of the longest-running of its kind. [...]
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ John Huston Lecture on Documentary Film will acknowledge John Huston himself with a special screening of his controversial World War II documentary classics San Pietro (aka The Battle of San Pietro) (above, 1944) and Let There Be Light (1946), on Tuesday, April 15, at 7:30 p.m. at [...]
Fitna, the work of hate created by Dutch far-right-wing member of Parliament Geert Wilders, is now available online. (Don’t expect a link to it here.)
I managed to watch bits and pieces of it before fast-forwarding through repetitive hate-filled discourses by fanatical Muslim clerics interspersed with scenes depicting terrorist attacks committed by Muslim fanatics. By using [...]
And you thought that Australia is a democracy, where adults are allowed to make their own choices regarding the movies (or books?) they want to enjoy without government interference? Well, think again…
Via the 2008 Melbourne Queer Film Festival website:
"The films they didn’t want you to see!
"The Melbourne Queer Film Festival special presentation of The Erotic [...]
Posted in Censorship, News, Politics on March 14th, 2008 1 Comment »
Dan Glickman is the current president of the Motion Picture Association of America, which represents the business interests of the big Hollywood studios which, for their part, are out there to defend the business interests of the megaconglomerates that own them.
At the film business Showest convention in Las Vegas, Glickman declared that "no one here [...]
The 46th Ann Arbor Film Festival will be held from March 25–30. More than 100 independent filmmakers from around the world are expected to attend, in addition to several special guests on a night devoted to freedom of speech issues. Among those guests are Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt, cinematographer-filmmaker Ellen Kuras, and artist Steve [...]
Recommended reading: On the The Independent’s Indyblogs, Jerome Taylor discusses Geert Wilders‘ as-yet-unreleased anti-Islam short Fitna.
Here are a couple of excerpts:
"An unapologetic critic of Islam, Mr [Geert] Wilders‘ rabidly populist rhetoric has won him both fans and enemies in a country already strained with religious tension following the murder of the controversial Dutch [...]
Academy Film Scholar Thomas Doherty will discuss his newly released book Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen & The Production Code Administration (mentioned on this blog in the post "Joseph I. Breen: Anti-Semite?") on Monday, March 17, at 7:30 p.m. at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ Linwood Dunn Theater in Hollywood. Admission is [...]
The Genie Awards 2008 ceremony, held last night in Toronto, was dominated by Sarah Polley’s remarkably accomplished directorial debut, Away from Her, which won a total of 7 awards.
The story of a man coming to terms with the fact that his Alzheimer’s-stricken wife has fallen in love with another patient at her mental hospital [...]
Agence France-Presse reports that organizers of the Cairo International Film Festival for Children has agreed to reinstate Mischa Kamp’s Dutch film Where is Sinterklaas’ Horse? (above) after banning it because Dutch far-right member of parliament Geert Wilders is planning to show a 15-minute anti-Muslim short, Fitna, online this month.
As per the AFP report, Fitna in [...]
Via Tim Drake’s "U.S. Bishops Withdraw Controversial Movie Review" in the National Catholic Register:
"’The aggressively anti-religious, anti-Christian undercurrent in The Golden Compass is unmistakable and at times undisguised,’ [Denver Archbishop Charles] Chaput wrote in a column in the Dec. 12 issue of the Denver Catholic Register. ‘The wicked Mrs. Coulter [above] alludes approvingly to a [...]
Thomas Doherty in The Forward:
"’These Jews seem to think of nothing but money making and sexual indulgence,’ fumed Joseph I. Breen in a letter to the Rev. Wilfrid Parsons, S.J., editor of the Jesuit weekly America. The year was 1932, and the hot-tempered Irish Catholic, lately summoned to Hollywood, Calif., by motion picture czar Will [...]
John Ireland and Marsha Hunt in Anthony Mann’s 1948 film noir Raw Deal.
This past October 17th, my dear friend, actress and social activist Marsha Hunt turned 90 years old. Her past few months have been a constant state of activity as the tributes to her seemed never-ending.
Turner Classic Movies honored her with a [...]
Front row (from left): Herbert Biberman, attorneys Martin Popper and Robert W. Kenny, Albert Maltz, Lester Cole. Middle row: Dalton Trumbo, John Howard Lawson, Alvah Bessie, Samuel Ornitz. Back row: Ring Lardner Jr., Edward Dmytryk, Adrian Scott.
Ed Rampell, author of Progressive Hollywood: A People’s Film History of the United States, remembers the Hollywood Ten at [...]
Veteran author Anthony Slide has another book out, Incorrect Entertainment or Trash from the Past: A history of political incorrectness and bad taste in 20th century American popular culture (BearManor, 2007, paperback, US$19.95).
Lengthy title for a highly controversial subject matter. Chapters range from "This Race Business" and "Sex" to "Bodily Functions and Dysfunctions" and "Hollywood’s [...]
In the San Diego Jewish Journal, Lynn Rapaport talks about the first Hollywood comedian to play Adolf Hitler on film. No, not Charles Chaplin. Try Moe Howard of the Three Stooges.
Rapaport’s article is a must read despite a couple of mistakes.
For instance, Hollywood has always — not just "until the late 1930s" — relied [...]
Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O’Connor’s Obscene is screening today at the Toronto International Film Festival. Thom Powers says the following about the film:
"Barney Rosset is one of the great unsung heroes in post-war America’s battle for free expression. As publisher of Grove Press and the Evergreen Review, he challenged obscenity bans against Lady Chatterley’s Lover, [...]
Based on a semi-autobiographical short story by Eileen Chang, the two-and-half-hour Se, jie / Lust, Caution, Ang Lee’s first Chinese-language film since the 2000 martial-arts epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, stars Tony Leung as a powerful politician who is seduced by a young woman (newcomer Tang Wei) involved with a group of revolutionary students. The [...]
Pokolenie / A Generation (1955)
Direction: Andrzej Wajda. Screenplay: Bohdan Czeszko, from his novel. Cast: Tadeusz Lomnicki, Urszula Modrzynska, Tadeusz Janczar, Janusz Paluszkiewicz, Ryszard Kotys, Roman Polanski, Zbigniew Cybulski
By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
Sometimes films get reputations way out of proportion with their artistic merit simply because they expound a point of view with which the public [...]
Robert Osborne in The Hollywood Reporter:
"It was a much-touted, much-seen and in some quarters much-admired motion picture in its time, with four Oscar nominations (and one win) to its credit and a cast filled with talented people who, if not yet icons, certainly became so in the years after: Sidney Poitier, Dorothy Dandridge, Pearl Bailey, [...]
This evening, Turner Classic Movies is showing several films with gay/bi/etc. characters as part of their Screened Out series. Two days ago, I was sent a link to the youtube video below. I’m posting it here as I found it both clever and perfectly appropriate to the occasion.
The video, created eight months ago by Robert [...]
Inspired by Richard Barrios’s book Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall, Turner Classic Movies (TCM) is presenting a 44-film festival that provides a glimpse into the way non-100-per-cent-heterosexuals have been portrayed on screen up to the time of the Stonewall riots of 1969. TCM host Robert Osborne will be discussing the [...]
